Cogent Communications is putting a number of its data centers up for sale on a wholesale basis.
Via LoopNet, Cogent and Avison Young are listing four Cogent data centers for sale or lease. The facilities span Orlando, Florida; Fort Worth, Texas; Elkridge, Maryland; and Akron, Ohio.
Facility sizes range from 38,650 sq ft (3,590 sq m) up to 110,740 sq ft (10,300 sq m), offering from 5MW to 14MW. The fiber company offers colocation services from each location.
The terms are flexible; Cogent says the sites are available to purchase, master lease, or on a wholesale colocation basis. To buy, the prices range from $44.1 million up to $140m, and total more than $310m for all four.
T-Mobile sold its Wireline business to Cogent for just $1 in September 2022. Much of the business sold was Sprint‘s legacy US long-haul fiber network, which T-Mobile had acquired as part of its $26 billion merger with Sprint in 2020.
Cogent’s acquisition included hundreds of technical buildings and switch sites previously used for Sprint’s wireline business – and Cogent has since set about converting the largest 48 in colocation data centers.
The new facilities are set to add some 1.8 million square feet of floor space and 169MW of capacity to Cogent’s existing colocation business – which previously totaled around 55 largely-leased colocation facilities and 77MW of capacity.
After tearing out legacy telecoms equipment, the company aims to occupy a small area at the site for its own network needs, and offer around 1MW and 10,000 sq ft of retail space at each location – with the remaining space and power originally set to lay idle unless needed for more retail. However, the company has since pivoted and is now actively looking to offer the remaining capacity at each site on a wholesale basis.
The company has told DCD the company is willing to either sell the sites and lease back what it needs for its own network and colo operations, or lease the sites to wholesale customers.
CEO Dave Schaeffer has previously said 21 of the 48 total sites that the firm is converting to data centers have been deemed suitable for wholesale monetization, totaling 88MW out of the 169MW.
Cogent is also decommissioning some legacy Cogent leased data center facilities that are redundant with its fee simple-owned Sprint facilities. A former Cogent facility in Herndon, Virginia, was recently put up for sale, but it's unclear when the company exited the site.
DCD sat down with Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer to discuss the company’s repurposing of legacy Sprint switch sites in the next issue of DCD>Magazine. Register for free today.